David Shulenburger, "The High Cost of Scholarly Journals (And What To Do About It)", Change Magazine, November/December 2003 (not online). Excerpt: "Scholarship, and hence the content of scholarly journals, is a public good. A public good is one for which one consumer's use of the good is not competitive with, or exclusive of, another consumer's use of the same good. [He then gives examples of national defense and clean air.] It has long been recognized that provision of public goods cannot be organized efficiently through the private market....The United States government believes so strongly in research as a public good that it funds NSF, NIH, and the research divisions of other federal agencies with public dollars so that scientists will create research on behalf of the larger society. It is nonsensical to provide billions each year for research and then completely ignore the mechanism by which the results of that research are disseminated....A federal statute should require that, as a condition for accepting a federal research grant, the scientist or scholar agrees to place each article reporting results from the research in a free, publicly accessible electronic domain after some period, say six months, of exclusive publication in a journal or other medium."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2003 11:45:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
